We Let Preschoolers Choose Their Own Games for Eight Weeks. Here's What Changed.

What happens when preschoolers get to decide what they want to play?

That question became the basis of an eight-week research partnership between our team at UC Davis and Lingokids, an educational app for young children. Unlike some of our other projects, we did not design the app ourselves. Instead, Lingokids already had something particularly useful for answering our question: two versions of the same app that gave children very different levels of control.

In one version, children followed a curated sequence of games. In the other, they could browse the app, choose which games they wanted to play, and return to games they had already played. The games covered vocabulary, math, and social-emotional skills.

That gave us an opportunity that can be difficult to create in a research lab: test a design feature inside a product children can actually use.

For eight weeks, 31 three- to five-year-olds at a preschool used one of the two versions of Lingokids for about 15 minutes, three times each week. Before and after the study, we worked individually with the children to assess their vocabulary, math, and social-emotional knowledge. Lingokids also provided back-end data showing how children actually used the app.

The difference between the two groups was not how much they played. Children in both versions spent almost exactly the same amount of time with the app and completed games at similar rates.

What changed was how they played.

Children who were able to choose their own games reported feeling more in charge of their experience. They also returned to games they had already played significantly more often than children following the predetermined curriculum.

That repetition turned out to matter, at least some of the time.

Children with choice showed significant gains over the eight weeks in vocabulary, math, and social-emotional knowledge, while children using the no-choice version showed significant gains only in math. More detailed analyses suggested that agency and repetition worked together differently depending on what children were learning. For social-emotional knowledge, children who felt more agentic and repeated games more tended to learn more. For vocabulary, greater exploration of different games appeared to be more useful than repeatedly returning to the same ones.

That distinction is important. Sometimes children may benefit from returning to something familiar. At other times, choosing to explore more content may expose them to more opportunities to learn.

The study also illustrates why partnerships between researchers and industry can be particularly useful for studying children's technology. Researchers can build tightly controlled experimental games, but those games are not always representative of the products children encounter outside the lab. Here, we were able to study two commercially available versions of an existing app over weeks of normal classroom use. That meant giving up some experimental control, but it also meant studying children's behavior in a much more realistic product environment.

For companies developing products for children, that kind of research can answer questions that standard engagement metrics cannot. We could see not only which games children selected or how long they played, but whether different patterns of use corresponded with changes in vocabulary, math, and social-emotional knowledge.

For researchers, the partnership gave us something equally valuable: the opportunity to test theories about agency and interactive media using a product children were already meant to use.

Our findings suggest that seemingly small design decisions (such as children choosing activities, whether they can return to something they enjoyed, or whether products encourage exploration) can change children's experience with educational media.

And sometimes, understanding whether a product works means looking beyond how much children use it to ask a more interesting question: What do children do when we let them decide?